QView Pro 3x Rewind FAQ

Symptom:
A large 200 page print job is printed to a NetWare queue. The job begins printing, however the printer jams after the first 50 pages. Is there any way to "rewind" the print job to page 49 and continue printing?

Discussion of problem:

If the printer is attached via serial, parallel, or nprinter/rprinter with pserver, you can interact with pserver.exe or pserver.nlm to "rewind" the printer data. An HP JetDirect (or equivalent) card or external box in rprinter/nprinter mode will work too.

JetDirect and other print server boxes in "pserver" mode will not interact with QView Pro, and can not be instructed to rewind print data.

If you can interact with pserver, you have several other issues to deal with.

• If the print job is plain text, pserver.exe/nlm can rewind the print job by counting the number of lines per page (as per the job form) and calculate where page 50 begins, and can start sending data from this spot in the print job data file. This works pretty good.

• If the print job is binary data, such as a rasterized page that a windows print driver generates for an HP printer, you may be able to rewind by a set number of bytes. If the job is 200 pages and the data file is 25Meg in size, each page will be approximately 125k in size. You could rewind 250k back, and try printing again, however the first page or two may look like garbage.
  
  If the printer was put into a specific mode (PCL/PostScript) and you reset the printer you can not rewind the job because the printer setup codes are usually only at the beginning of the print job.

• If the print job is PostScript, you can not rewind it from the print server because PostScript is an interpreted language. One error in the data stream will cause the interpreter to abort the print job.

Solution:

First, you must have QView Pro v3.xx for Windows. The DOS version does not have the ability to interact with pserver. Configure your queues to be serviced by pserver.nlm/exe.

Once the print job is printing, double click on the job from the main QView Pro display. Click on the printer button to establish a connection with the pserver.nlm/exe. A dialog showing the print server status will be displayed. Click on the rewind button to show the rewind dialog. Refer to the QView Pro documentation for details on how to use this dialog. The chapter Rewind Print Job in the documentation covers the use of this feature.

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